there’s no way it’s true, but a part of me wants to believe that Elon Musk is, like, some sort of galaxy-brained Terra-Ignota-character long-game utilitarian

who thinks “if we keep letting social media rot our minds, we’ll never make it to Mars, as a species”

and so, in an act of noble self-sacrifice, has taken it upon himself to destroy the worst – the most consequentially mind-rotting – of the social networks

even if he has to sacrifice his business empire to do it, even if he has to make himself a laughingstock in the public eye … it’s worth it, you know. for the greater good. for Humanity. for Mars.

Broke: “matrix multiplication”

Woke: “a two-layer MLP with orthogonally parameterized weight matrices, weight normalization, a linear activation function, and no bias”

nice

 Jordan Peterson feels very … Russian to me?

This isn’t some Russiagate thing, I’m not talking about modern politics – he just seems like a Dostoyevsky character or something.  This intense, vibrating, quasi-religious quasi-madman, very concerned with Man and Good and Evil, sensationally popular among university students

DiAngelo hopes that her consciousness raising is at least having a ripple effect, contributing to a societal shift in norms. “You’re watching network TV, and they’re saying ‘systemic racism’ — that it’s in the lexicon is kind of incredible,” she said. So was the fact that “young people understand and use language like ‘white supremacy.’” She listed more evidence for optimism: “It’s in the extent of the protests. It’s in banning the confederate flag at NASCAR races. The renaming of military bases. Walmart agreeing to stop locking the ethnic hair-care products. We need a culture where a person who resists speaking up against racism is uncomfortable, and right this moment it looks like we’re in that culture.”

Yet she described a warning from her daily life in Seattle. “I was in the supermarket the other day, and over the cheese section was a small sign saying, ‘Black Lives Matter.’” Its lettering was childlike, in a cheery array of pink, green and blue, and it was plainly mass-produced. “It was like a Hallmark card,” she said. The phrase floated above the meticulous display of provolone, fontina and Emmentaler, stripped of all power, a message of fleeting intent.

ah yes of course, the seattle anecdote any of us would have related if asked about the future of blm,

Just got a spam text that said “Robert, tell your story with the help of experts” followed by a link

Such an opaque pitch… sounds almost threatening, strong-arming, like “we know all about your ‘story’, Robert.  we are many and powerful, and we want to help – to help you tell your ‘story’ in the correct way, you see.  our way.”

taliesin validsman and his validsman talisman

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

sexy blog post: i own all four major waves of leftist feminism

I thought I was going to endearingly fail to reference the historical Oedeburgh trial in any way by trying to simply write about it in a weird jokey way, but I couldn’t resist making it into a joke:

“In 17th century England, the villainous Hedgewitch was so revered that he was called ‘Holy Cock Robin’.”  In fact, the Oedeburgh Trial was merely an old burlesquing over a silly bit of a play called “Rob Roy’s Smaug from Oedeburgh’,” whose name (“Oedeburgh”?) was possibly an obscenity; the humor was that the signwriter could only spell Rob by reversing it

only the avatar, master of all four waves of leftist feminism,

one large CalArts-style pizza, please